I’m really liking dotPeek, JetBrains’ new decompiler. It’s not perfect – it is still in pre-beta after all - it’s a bit slow, there are things it has trouble decompiling (Silverlight reactive framework for one) but what it does have is a killer feature – ReSharper’s navigation and code analysis – go to type, go to symbol, deriving classes, show usages, etc. Everything you could need for a good bit of code spelunking.

Everything except assembly lists.

Reflector’s got a lovely feature that allows you to switch between lists of different assemblies, so I can be looking through the Silverlight reactive framework, then switch over to wander through the ReSharper API and then jump into the dotPeek assembly list. All very handy, and all very much missing from dotPeek.

Fortunately, the nice folks at JetBrains have included ReSharper’s plugin model into dotPeek. So, check this out:

Looks remarkably familiar, no?

It’s dead easy to install:

Since dotPeek doesn’t have a standard installer, create a folder called plugins wherever it is you’ve installed dotPeek to

Extract the files from the zip file and dump them in the “plugins” folder, preferably in their own folder, such as “AssemblyLists”

Now, when you start dotPeek, you’ll get a new entry in the FIle menu, and a new button on the toolbar in the Assembly Explorer that will bring up the list management window. Add, remove or rename your lists here. They should stay up to date with whatever was last selected in the assembly explorer, and will save and load between sessions.

One word of warning – the assembly lists are stored in a shared file, and if you start dotPeek without the plugin, it WILL lose your lists.

Let me know what you think – issues and whatnot on github, or @citizenmatt on twitter. Ta!